Content Management System (CMS)
Content Management System is used for the control and editing of content. Content includes electronic files, images and video based media, audio files, electronic documents and web text.
The main concept behind a CMS is to make these files available for editing inter-office or over the Internet. A Content Management System is often used to archive documents as well. Many companies use CMS's to store files in non-proprietary form.
Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.
A content management system is most likely able to provide the following features:-
- Import and create documents and multimedia material
- Identify the main users and their roles within the content management system
- An ability to assign certain roles and rights within the system and across differing content types and categories.
- Define management and system workflows, definitions, tasks and possibly even tied in with event messaging so that managers of the content are notified of changes to specific content.
- An ability to record, track and manage many, many versions of the same content or files - a document management system with versioning.
- An ability to publish content to an centralised content archive, to facilitate greater access to the content. More importantly with time, this repository is an vital element of the system, and incorporates search and retrieval methods.
- Some content management systems allow the text based aspect of it's content to be separated and to some extent have many different types of formatting applied to it - fonts, colours, layout styles etc.